


Memories we hide

by orphan_account



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:28:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27876881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Wendy knew that her father was always so... stoic. And angry, too, a lot. But most of all, he was always scared of the things that lay hidden on their cabin's dusty attic.And for the first time, she finally found out why - and what they were.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	Memories we hide

**Author's Note:**

> For anon on tumblr :-) !!
> 
> Also I am SO sorry that Dan (Wendy's dad) is VERY ooc (out of character) in this... i actually rewatched some episodes of Gravity Falls where he's in it and he doesn't really have a character at all?? He's just angry most of the time so I naturally HAD to give him some charactera ahgjfhg 
> 
> anyways enjoy this fic!!

  
“What the heck, guys, the attic was supposed to be cleaned yesterday!” Wendy exclaims, picking up the fallen books on the floor. Her brothers, on the other side, continued running around the house chasing each other as if she hadn’t said anything. “Marcus! Gus! Kevin! Stop running around and _help me!_ ”  
  
The three stopped for a moment, standing in place to watch her. “We did clean the house yesterday while you were away,” Kevin tells her. “The attic’s your turn.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Yeah! Your turn, Wendy. Let’s go!” And with that, they ran out of the house, leaving her back with the mess she has to clean after. Wendy groans. “Fucking hell,” she curses quietly, not wanting to be heard. Her dad might have the whole “manly” thing going on around the family, but cursing weren’t one of them, especially around her younger brothers.  
  
She looks around small cabin, sighing heavily. Living in a small space with three growing boys and a grown man was something that she needed to keep getting used to overtime. Wendy _hated_ it. Not only that middle schooler boys are difficult and, well, sometimes _are_ a jerk—she has to take care of them too, since her father was out working most of the time. In an attempt to fix that, Dan had bought an old caravan on her fifteenth birthday and made it into a separate “room” for her to live in. It was nice that he tried, she guesses, but it wasn’t the same. She still has to take care of the house and her brothers while trying to keep up with school—and honestly, it’s exhausting. It’s all so _fucking_ exhausting.  
  
If she still had a mother, maybe she wouldn’t have so much responsibilities.  
  
“Ah, fuck,” Wendy curses herself as she dropped the stack of books she had picked up on the table. Back to work, back to work—it was the only thing that she does when the thought of her mother crosses her mind. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s a real pain in the ass. And she knows that it’s not good, to keep running away from it, but what else could she do? Her father was the one who taught her that coping mechanism, after all.  
  
Which reminds her…  
  
“Dad?” she calls, walking out of the house and into the front porch. She finds him cutting up logs into smaller pieces on the front yard, a piling stack of woods on his back. “Dad, we have to clean up the house, remember? It’s Sunday.”  
  
“Oh.” He registered it for a while. “Yeah, yeah, right. I’ll do it later.”  
  
“You said that _yesterday.”_  
  
“I have work to do, Wen.” He gestures to the pile of uncut logs in front of him.  
  
“Let one of the boys do it, they could use a bit of work. Come on.” She tilts her head for him to follow, and her father sighs, calling one of her brothers to continue the job before following her into the house. “Okay, what do I have to do?”  
  
“Oh, not much. You can just go clean the attic and I’m going to finish up around here. I’ll catch up with you upstairs later—”  
  
“Nope. Not the attic.” Dan says almost immediately, which made her frown. “Why don’t we switch; _I’ll_ finish up around here and you can go up first. I’ll catch up later.”  
  
Wendy blinks. “Um… okay, then?” she walks slowly towards the stairs. She doesn’t usually see her father so reluctant about something as if he was… scared. “Hey, just to be sure—there aren’t any ghosts or anything up there, right?”  
  
Her father frowns. “What? No, of course not.”  
  
“Then what are you so afraid of?”  
  
He looks right into her eyes. “Memories, Wendy.”  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
And as she sat down on the dusty attic floor staring at the box filled with her mother’s belongings, she began to understand what her father had meant.  
  
She was only supposed to sweep and dust. That was what she was supposed to do, and _only_ that—but her father’s words kept running around in her head, urging her to find out what he had meant.  
  
And she now that she did, she’s not so sure that it was a good idea after all.  
  
She’s sitting there now, on the dusty attic floor, staring at an old cardboard box filled with her mother’s belongings. She knew that it was all hers from the framed picture of her she had pulled out when she first found the box—an old, worn out picture, with beige tints all over it as if it was taken a hundred years ago. The box itself wasn’t in a good shape either. There were patches of holes on its sides—rats, maybe? She’d have to tell her father later about that.  
  
Later. Because right now, she couldn’t move, staring at the picture with the mess of feelings inside her that she didn’t quite understand yet.  
  
Her mother. She was beautiful.  
  
Wendy didn’t remember her much, but she hadn’t expected her mother to look so…. _feminine_. Not in the degrading way, of course—she was beautiful. Wendy kept repeating those words in her head. _She’s beautiful. She’s beautiful.  
  
_ Was.  
  
Her mother was wearing a green knee-length dress and black leggings, in that picture, almost resembling the pine trees on her background. She’s holding a stick of cigarette in between her fingers, and there’s a cheeky, sideways smile on her face as she posed for the camera. She looked so… young, and alive, and _beautiful_ —for a moment Wendy doesn’t believe what her mind was telling her. She doesn’t believe that this person was once her mother. She doesn’t _want_ to.  
  
It hurts.  
  
Wendy drops the frame back to the box. _Nope. No. Keep working. Keep working._ She stands up, brushing the dust off her pants and flannel, picked up the broom she had dropped and began sweeping again. She hated how easy it is for her mind to keep drifting back to the thought of her mother, especially after she finally knew what she looked like. How old was she when her mother died? Six? Seven? Wendy doesn’t exactly remember. Maybe that was the reason why she never really knew what her mother had looked like. She was too young.  
  
Maybe it was better that way.  
  
 _Green dress. Black leggings. Cigarette.  
  
_ What was her mother like? Was she kind? She looked like she was. Was she funny? Was she cool? Did she liked climbing trees, too? Cutting woods? What did her voice sound like? Her laugh? How did it feel when she holds you in her arms—  
  
 _STOP!_ Wendy exclaims in her head. Something stings in her throat, and in her eyes, and before she knows it, a tear slipped down her face without her permission. She wipes it off angrily. _You don’t cry over someone you don’t even remember, Wendy._ _You don’t._  
  
“Hey, Wen, do you still need my help upsta—”  
  
She gasps, startled, wiping off the remaining tears and blinked a few times quickly to get rid of any evidence that she had been crying. “No, I’m—‘m fine, dad. I’m good.” She turns around, only to find him staring at her from the stairs, an unreadable expression in his face.  
  
“Dad…?”  
  
“What happened?”  
  
Wendy shook her head. “No. Nothing. It was just the dust, it got in my eyes.” She wipes her eyes again. “I’m good.”  
  
He sighs. “You found it, didn’t you?”  
  
She doesn’t know how to answer that.  
  
“No, it’s alright. I just… didn’t think the day would be today.” Dan says heavily, walking over to the box she had left on the ground. He sits down beside it and gestured for her to come over.  
  
“I… I found it, accidentally, while I was dusting.” Wendy just shrugs when she approached him. “It’s no big deal, dad, really.”  
  
He looks up at her. “But it is, Wendy.”  
  
“It’s really not.”  
  
“Okay. Just sit here with me while I see, then.” Dan tells her, and she had no other choice but to sit down and watch him pick up the framed picture of her mother and dust it off, just like she had a few moments ago. “You know, I’ve always hated cleaning up the house. I was afraid that I might stumble upon something of your mother’s.”  
  
“I understand, now,” Wendy just shrugs. “I’ll never clean up the house ever again, I promise.”  
  
Her father laughed gruffly. “Oh, I hope not. I don’t know what the house would be without you nagging us to clean it up every month.”  
  
She laughs with him, even if was just a little bit.  
  
“I’ve never really apologized to you, you know. For… everything, really.”  
  
Wendy frowns. “What do you mean?”  
  
“I’ve never properly talked to you about your mother before.” He says. “And without any of us noticing it, it’s affected you and your brothers, too.”  
  
“How?”  
  
“Well, we’re never really the best at expressing our feelings, are we?” Dan asks, tilting his head towards the box. “I’ve always avoided everything related to your mother, and over time, so have you.”  
  
Wendy tries to look like she’s focusing on the hem of her flannels instead. “Yeah. I guess.”  
  
“It’s not good.” He confesses, dropping the picture onto the box and began rummaging through it. “I know it hurts, but it’s not good, avoiding your feelings.”  
  
“So why did you?” She couldn’t help but ask.  
  
Dan sighs. “Remember her funeral?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Well, at her funeral, everyone said about how it would be good for me to take a few weeks off for myself,” he began. “To readjust. To grieve properly. But I said no to all of that, because everyone knows how _that_ will end.”  
  
She’s never heard her father talk this much about himself before. “How?”  
  
He looks into her eyes. “First, “alright”, you say. You let yourself grieve. But then, you’d get so carried on that you just don’t know how to stop doing that. Most of the time, people don’t know how to get over it. Then they never stop. And before they know it, they’re going to find themselves sitting on a worn out couch with beer bottles littered everywhere, five, ten years in the future, wasting their lives away. Their soul dying along with the person they loved.”  
  
Wendy stares at him, a bit horrified.  
  
“Now you understand why I never grieved in the first place.” Her father just shrugs, as if he hadn’t said anything. “I thought to myself, _no,_ I couldn’t do that, no matter how much I wanted to just drop on the floor and cry each passing day. I have four young children to take care of. I couldn’t let that happen.”  
  
She nods. “I’m sure mom wouldn’t want that, either.”  
  
“Yes,” He agreed, “but the thing is, Wendy, what I did wasn’t right either. I pretended like your mother never died—some days I pretended like she never existed. And without any of us realizing it, you copied me. And then your brothers did too. And look how we are now.”  
  
Wendy looks down. “I’d rather have this than… whatever scenario you just told me.”  
  
“I know,” Dan says. “But… do you ever realize it, Wendy? Your brothers have never _really_ seen your mother’s face.”  
  
“Neither have I.”  
  
“Oh, no, you have,” he shook. “The first few weeks after the funeral, you stared at this picture every night before you go to sleep.” He pulls out another worn out picture out of the box carefully, this one without a frame. It was a picture of her mother with the same dress, but this time with a beret on her head—the same, dark green shade of her dress and the pine trees all around her. Another cigarette hangs off her mouth, two fingers holding it up as she smiled for the camera.  
  
“She’s beautiful,” Wendy couldn’t help but mutter those words again.  
  
“She was.” Her father agreed, putting the picture back in the box. Wendy ached to hold it in her own hands. “She used to wear glasses too, you know—for reading. I’ve always thought it looked silly on her. Let me find that other picture somewhere in here…” he rummages through the box again.  
  
“What was she… what was she like?” She asks. “Mom?”  
  
“Oh, she—she was a lot of things. It’s… it’s hard to describe her, really. She’s…” He thought about it for a while. “Bold. And lovely. She’s like—like a deer in the forest, you know—elegant, but wild. She…” he shook his head. “She was a lot like you.”  
  
“She was?”  
  
“Every time I look at you, it always reminds me of her, even until now.”  
  
Wendy looks down, fingers still playing with the hem of her shirt as a distraction. “You… you’ve never told me any of that.”  
  
“Well, now I have.”  
  
She looks up. “Will you tell me again? More?”  
  
Dan shook his head once again. He stood up, bringing the box along with him, and for a second Wendy felt panic surging through her bloodstreams. What’s he going to do? Will he throw them all away? Will he burn them, because they’re all too painful for him to see? She wanted to take the box away from him and keep it safe in her arms.  
  
But then her father smiles to her, the most genuine one he’s ever seen from him. Not an awkward one, not a sad one—just a simple smile. As if he’s finally happy. Content. “Not here,” he tells her. “Downstairs, with your brothers. Call them for me?”  
  
She nods, getting up so quickly that her head spins. “Of course.” It felt like the weight of the world had been taken off her shoulders, and when she looks at her father once again, it looks like he felt the same, too. The house looked brighter. It _felt_ brighter, as if there used to be a huge dark shroud covering it. But it’s not there anymore, now. It doesn’t feel like it, at least.  
  
And for the first time in so long, they finally felt content and alive again.  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> [my tumblr blog !!](https://hereforthehurts.tumblr.com/)


End file.
